STEM alone won't breed innovation: Column

Feb. 5, 2013
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President Obama watches a marshmallow launched from a gun designed by Joey Hudy of Phoenix during the White House Science Fair last year. He has announced plans for a STEM Master Teacher Corps. / Susan Walsh, AP

by Katrina Trinko, USA TODAY

by Katrina Trinko, USA TODAY

In his inaugural address last month, President Obama re-enforced his commitment to education and the need for a greater focus on the areas of math and science.

"No single person can train all the math and science teachers we'll need to equip our children for the future. ... Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation and one people."

Last week, a bipartisan group of senators unveiled proposals for immigration reform that include rewarding immigrants who receive advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering and math areas from U.S. universities with green cards. Fine, put more emphasis on education in STEM, but not at the sacrifice of a good liberal arts education.

There's no doubt in our technology-driven times that we need plenty of graduates who can tackle such subjects. But even technology wizards can become more innovative with a solid background in liberal arts.

Consider the late Steve Jobs, who co-founded Apple. Jobs attended a calligraphy class at Oregon's Reed College. Decades later, in a 2005 Stanford commencement address, Jobs recalled the course and said, "It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture." Yet none of what he learned "had even a hope of any practical application in my life."

Even so, when Jobs was creating the first Mac a decade after that calligraphy class, he remembered the lessons of that class and applied them. "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts," Jobs recounted. "Since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them."

Jobs isn't alone in having a creative background: Norio Ohga, a former president of Sony who passed away in 2011, was an opera singer before joining Sony full-time.

"Ohga's love of music and keen ear for quality audio would define his career and play a key role in Sony's establishment as a leading name in the audio industry," wrote IDG News Service's Martyn Williams, noting that Sony invented the Walkman and the compact disc during Ohga's tenure.

So why is Florida proposing lower tuition rates for STEM students than liberal arts majors? It's an idea that's about as smart an innovation as New Coke. It would be different if Florida were considering changing tuition rates to reflect a college's true cost of offering a certain major - say in liberal arts.

For instance, the education of an engineering major who attends smaller classes might cost a college more than the education of a literature major, who is able to attend larger classes. That could be an innovative strategy to distribute heavy college costs fairly.

Instead, an education task force created by Florida Gov. Rick Scott proposed in November freezing the tuition rates for three years for "high-skill, high-wage, high-demand" majors - which suggests it will likely benefit plenty of STEM majors. The idea is not because those majors are cheaper for colleges to offer, but because Florida wants more such graduates for its workforce.

Never mind that there's already an incentive for students: Such graduates already tend to have more lucrative careers than many of their peers.

Part of technology, sure, is the nuts and bolts, the math and science and engineering involved to create an actual product from an idea. But another component - and this is the part that has made recent decades so exciting - is imagination.

Someone imagined a world where phones were portable, where an entire library could be crammed into one small device, where people across the globe could shoot a video or chat in real time.

Sure, science and math can fire up people's imaginations. But so can literature and philosophy - and even calligraphy.

We need well-rounded students, not just STEM geniuses.

Katrina Trinko, who writes forNational Review Online,also is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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